Todd Carter and the Story of “Minivan”–the 300-pound Buck

Author’s note: Todd Carter of Oldham County, Kentucky manages about 7,500 acres for wildlife and has one 800-acre farm he manages intensively. He’s been a PSE pro and also on the Mossy Oak Pro Staff.

We called this buck Minivan, because he was a really big buck, well over 300 pounds live weight. He was big and blocky and resembled a minivan. Minivan was six years old, and we’d tried to take him a few years earlier. He just didn’t look like he ever would have a quality rack. His rack had a lot of stickers on it and a lot of mass.

The year before, he’d only had about a 120-inch rack. He had a few drop tines on the right side of his rack, but wasn’t an impressive deer. We’d labeled him as a management buck and planned to shoot him to get him off the property. I agreed to take this buck, even though I wasn’t expecting him to be very big or have good antlers.

There were several other trophy bucks on the property the landowner and his friends wanted to take themselves. Another buck living in the same area was a four-year-old 10-point that scored 160 points. We didn’t want six-year-old Minivan to run the four-year-old off the property. We intensively manage the deer on the property where I hunt, and we know we can’t stockpile mature bucks in our area. To grow a trophy buck, he needs to be able to hold in his home area without being challenged by another big buck.

Minivan always had lived close to a road. I knew Minivan was living in a certain thicket, and when he came out of this thicket, he would go eat some native grass and then move to a pond below where he’d been bedding.

I set up my stand, so when the buck came out of the thicket on the way to the native grass, I’d be able to get a shot with my PSE Evo. Sure enough, he moved out of the thicket and came down the trail 15 yards from me. When I released the arrow, he took off running. He went about 70 yards and fell over in native grass. When we recovered him, we found he scored 168 points.